ICANN approves IDNs for China, Taiwan, Thailand, Sri Lanka…

ICANN not only answered my question about China, but also about a host of additional countries (and territory) that had applied for fast-track IDNs.

Here are the most recent IDN (string evaluation) approvals:

China (cn): 中國 (traditional); 中国 (simplified)

Hong Kong (hk): 香港

Palestinian Territory (ps): فلسطين

Qatar (qa): قطر

Sri Lanka (lk): ලංකා (Sinhalese); இலங்கை (Tamil)

Taiwan (tw): 台湾 (simplified); 台灣 (traditional)

Thailand (th): ไทย

Tunisia (tn): تونس

For the full list of IDNs now in the ICANN pipeline, I’ve created a page here. It also explains why you may not be able to view all of the scripts on this blog post.

ICANN says it has given preliminary approval for IDNs in 19 countries across 11 languages. Note that this means that these IDNs have passed the string review, which is arguably the most difficult phase. But there is still one stage left before those domains can go live. And don’t get me started on the challenges that some of these domains will pose to existing web browsers — that’s the topic of a future post.